Home Genetic Testing May Cause Surprises; Better Pay Attention

In a recent blog note, I discussed the possibility of being"surprised" when a genetic test revealed that one had a predisposition to develop early Alzheimer's disease (see: Genetic Testing Could Lead to a Discovery of Genes Predisposing to Alzheimer's). In this same vein, here's a link to an article that discusses in detail some of the"surprises" that may come about about one's parentage is revealed as a result of consumer-oriented DNA home testing (see:As home DNA tests become more common, people must grapple with surprises about their parents). Below is an excerpt from it:More people than ever before are expected to buy a DNA-test this Christmas from sites like AncestryDNA or 23andMe....Millions have already gotten tested. And for many of these people, the results are unexpected, shocking, and occasionally even life-changing.The direct-to-consumer genetic testing market, which includes both health and genealogy tests, is expected to grow from about $70 million in 2015 to $340 million by 2022....CNBC spoke to a dozen people who took a DNA test to find out fun facts about their ethnic roots, then were surprised to learned they were donor-conceived.That means the men who had raised them were not their biological fathers -- instead, their parents had faced fertility problems, and their mothers had used sperm from donors at a fertility clinic. Research from 2005 found that so-calledpaternity discrepancy, when a person is identified as be...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Clinical Lab Testing Genomic Testing Healthcare Information Technology Lab Industry Trends Medical Consumerism Medical Ethics Medical Research Source Type: blogs